How a leading Contracts Manager is modernising procurement

Alchemy Construct is a leading commercial construction company based in Melbourne, celebrated for its commitment to excellence and integrity in project delivery. With over 600 projects successfully completed and a team of more than 60 experienced professionals, Alchemy brings together over 800 years of combined expertise.

As a longtime champion of digital innovations, the Alchemy team embraced digital procurement in 2022 and decided to implement ProcurePro. We spoke with Adrian Gilmore, Contracts Manager, at the annual 5Ps Conferences to hear more about Alchemy’s journey with digital procurement and the impact ProcurePro has had on his team.

Hi Adrian! Can you give us a little bit of a background to yourself and to Alchemy?

Adrian Gilmore: I'm the Contracts Manager at Alchemy and I've been at Alchemy for the last seven years. I have a background in Civil Engineering. I'm also from Ireland and have been in Australia for eight years.

Why did Alchemy decide to take the leap digitising procurement?

Adrian Gilmore: Alchemy's a fairly young business, just going into our 10th year. We have the advantage of growing our business and really jumping on to digitalised platforms.

We've had platforms like Procore for document control, project management and we use Hammertech for safety. Procurement was that missing piece.

With the old way of doing it, you have all these Excel sheets, Word documents. It was a really manual process, time consuming for everyone. But it was the way everyone knew. It was just a norm. So it was a real no brainer to digitalise procurement and save those efficiencies.

What have been the biggest impacts since Alchemy digitised procurement?

Adrian Gilmore: ProcurePro gives the time saving and the efficiencies to us so our CAs and our project team can really focus on the more critical details of projects.

We worked out we're saving over 40,000 pages a year compared to the old way of having everything printed out and hard copies signed.

The more you can digitise every process, you're saving so much time, and ultimately time is money. Throughout the year, it definitely has a positive effect.

Have you noticed any other impacts you wouldn’t have expected?

Adrian Gilmore: No one wants to do paperwork. Whether it's the PCs or CAs and Project Managers, if you can take as much paperwork and time consuming processes away it's only going to benefit them.

The first thing everyone says when they first use ProcurePro is, 'this is just amazing, this is great'. It definitely helps the mood within the teams and it gives enjoyment to procurement.

Alchemy rolled out ProcurePro across 20 projects in just over 8 weeks. What was that implementation like?

Adrian Gilmore: When I first joined Alchemy seven years ago, we had no software, no platforms. It was just emails, Excel, and Word. I've been part of rolling out a lot of our processes and systems and have pulled out my hair a few times throughout, but with ProcurePro it was really a breeze.

Since every CA, Project Coordinator, or PM is used to doing the steps already, they didn’t have to learn anything new. It's a very user-friendly platform. The training and the support that ProcurePro provides as well is excellent. After about eight weeks we just decided it was time to roll it out across all of our projects. It was very seamless.

What’s your advice for successfully rolling out new technology?

Adrian Gilmore: The industry is definitely adopting technology more and you need to do your research to make sure that you're picking the correct platform that will work for you.

The main thing is nominating a champion to spearhead the implementation. If you don't do that, it can stagnate and you might not get the best benefits out of the software.

Also, if you don't drive that initial phase of implementation it might seem like an overhead upfront cost, but without a doubt the efficiencies you'll save throughout the rest of the year and many years to come will completely outweigh that initial overhead.

Has there been any commercial impacts at Alchemy since implementing ProcurePro?

Adrian Gilmore: There have been improvements across the entire company since using ProcurePro. In particular, the analytics and PowerBI reporting that the system provides gives us massive insight about the business.

We use it for procurement opportunities. We now have direct visibility to see whether a couple of project teams are all procuring for a painter at the same time and we can look to consolidate multiple packages.

Before ProcurePro, you had siloed teams out on-site and you often didn't have full visibility. We use reports on a month to month basis to get the teams to communicate and work together on those particular packages.

Estimating trends is also really vital. We can hammer our estimating team and show them which packages they're dropping the ball on.

We definitely use ProcurePro for lessons learned in our pre-con team and regularly look at that data. Our pre-con manager uses that data then to sit his team down to say, ‘these are the particular areas in the last 12 months where we've missed some particular trades’, but then also team workload.

We have clear data and numbers now on how many packages a particular CA has to procure.

The rising costs coming out of COVID was definitely a key factor to try and push procurement as quickly as possible, but also as efficiently and as accurately as possible.

How has ProcurePro helped Alchemy get visibility over staff workload?

Adrian Gilmore: The analytics reporting shows us how many packages each employee is working on, so we can clearly see whether it's a project coordinator and how many they're working on, and whether that's actually sustainable for that project coordinator depending on their experience.

We can look to buddy them up with a CA or senior CA, and really provide that support for that particular employee as well. It definitely gives us great insight there.

Would you go back to procuring without ProcurePro?

Adrian Gilmore: No, I could never imagine going back. I don't think it would be possible to even imagine procuring manually again.

For us, ProcurePro was the missing piece for digitisation. The way the industry is going to go, technology is only going to adapt even more.

What made ProcurePro’s implementation plan and process so smooth compared to others?

Adrian Gilmore: The team at ProcurePro did a fantastic job. With a lot of other systems, I had to do training for our staff. But ProcurePro actually provides one-on-one training for any new starters.

Everyone knows how to do procurement already. They're not learning new processes, not learning how to do scopes, they're not learning how to do procurement. They're just learning how to use a new platform.

It's such a user-friendly platform. We do have a fairly up tech savvy project team as well. They're all used to using different platforms and technology out there. That definitely helps.

I think any business just needs to put in that initial upfront resource to really get it up and running and once that’s sorted then the cost to keep it going and the maintenance on that system will be totally outweighed by the efficiencies that you're saving with all your project teams.